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Contingency Recruiting with HirePatriots The United States Military trains and produces the best leaders in the world. They possess hands on, under fire, experience that surpasses that of almost all civilians. Their characters, work ethic and mission driven attitude are exceptional. Since 2004, HirePatriots has assisted hundreds of companies that have turned to us to […]

Tips On Thrive in a Down Economy

IMPEDING YOUR SUCCESS

Many business owners are seriously impeding their own success, because their thoughts are primarily fear based. If you’re envisioning the worst for yourself and your business, if your conversations are focused predominately on bad news, then you’ll impact your own success. Instead of giving succor to all the negative blathering, buckle down and determine to take three actions every single day to improve revenue! Lauren Mathews makes it easy for you by providing some suggestions.

SMALL BUSINESS ACTION PLAN

1) Don’t you Dare Pick up that Phone Unless it’s to Generate Business! Be ruthlessly disciplined about generating business as job one. Any activity that doesn’t secure new business should be delegated, or done during non-business hours. Prioritize everything else around this fundamental principle. During business hours, dedicate yourself exclusively to building your business.

2) Virtually Stalk your Prospects: Describe your ideal client. What types of organizations do they belong to? Join them. What kinds of publications do they read? Read them. What types of events do they attend? Attend them. Differentiate yourself with detective work about your targeted prospects. Research them; tap your network to learn more. This information helps warm up cold contacts, sets you apart from the most others who won’t go to this much effort.

3) Work Backward to Move Forward: If you’re tracking important ratios, you know how many qualified prospect meetings it takes to generate one client, and the average sale per client. With only these two pieces of information, you can control how much you sell each month. Determine desired sales volume, then conduct two to three times the number of qualified prospect meetings required to achieve it.

4) Invite Scrutiny: Whose business acumen do you admire? Who’s already successful in your field? Whose clientele does your product or service compliment? Invite these folks to be your Advisory Board. Meet quarterly to gain their advice on you business challenges. Advisory boards impose a level of scrutiny and accountability that both challenge and comfort. Ensure you get unbiased, unemotional, tough truths by not including friends and loved ones on the board.

5) Your Pipeline is your Lifeline: Never stop prospecting. In good times or bad, keep your pipeline full! Even when you’re flush with business, don’t get cocky. Realize that if you wait to prospect until you need new clients; it’ll be too late to achieve immediate results.

6) You Lag Before you Bag: The lag time between your first meeting with a qualified prospect and the closing the sale is an essential ratio for managing your productivity. The sales you bag today likely began at least 3 months ago!

7) Play the Numbers: Whether you enjoy it or not is irrelevant; networking is an imperative. Learn how to do it well. If you want to survive the lean times, you have to network regularly, and focus on helping others. Understand that networking is a numbers game. Play to win!

8) Don’t Pander; Ponder! Showcasing your wisdom without taking time to probe causal factors can be insulting. Instead, honor the complexity of client issues. Be inquisitive about their goals, frustrations, hopes, and struggles. Then construct a matrix of options, and augment this with the advantages and disadvantages of each.

9) Prepare to Bend by Predicting the Trends: Be vigilant about monitoring relevant trends, since they’re always in flux. Even more importantly, anticipate and maintain an awareness regarding forces that could affect the trends you’re monitoring. Doing so enables you to foresee and adapt to emerging trends before your competitors do.

10) Don’t Defer Getting Referrals: If you’re not comfortable asking your satisfied clients to provide referrals, do it anyway! Once you’ve delighted them, conduct a brief interview to learn what they valued most about working with you. Using this information, draft a brief testimonial for them to edit and print onto their letterhead.

11) Publicize or Perish: Both credibility and sales increase from publishing articles or books, and speaking on your area of expertise. It’s not that hard! Every time you solve a problem for a client, produce an outline the process from start to finish. Then fill in the outline, and voila, you have an article or a speech. Multiple articles can comprise a book. Writing a book is less daunting if you write only one chapter at a time without thinking of it as a book.

12) Value for Free = Service for Fee: Consider providing an educational session to prospective clients at no charge, but structure the delivery so that they want more. For example, deliver the information you promised to deliver, but make reference to additional, high value information your clients receive.

13) Don’t Attend Conventions without Clear Intentions: Recoup the opportunity cost of attending conventions. Get an attendee list in advance of the meeting, identify and research your targets before you even leave town. Then make it your mission at the meeting to establish contact and engage them. Remember: attendance is not an outcome. Make your attendance result in new business by preparing in advance.

14) Break it Down to Build it Up: Identify key result areas of your business, such as prospecting, delivery, marketing, speaking, new product development, etc. For each, write out measurable goals each quarter. Break these down into component parts, and include them in your calendaring tool.

No matter how many of these tips you implement, your own outlook and attitude can diminish their effectiveness. Those who prevail in difficult times are the ones who steadfastly refuse to allow negativity to form a barrier to their success – who instead deliberately and diligently take constructive action, thereby refreshing and reinvigorating their minds and their spirits, enabling them to take more action, which refreshes and reinvigorates.

Patriotic Hearts' mission is to create effective economic stability and enhancement programs that assists U.S. Military, veterans and their families and aids their return to the civilian sector as healthy, successful and important contributors to the American way of life; and, to educate the US citizenry about their valiant sacrifices and value to our nation.

Our Programs

Job Fairs

HirePatriots has hosted many job fairs for the U.S. military and veterans. HirePatriots has a stellar reputation with businesses across America and the world. And of course, we are highly regarded by the U.S. military.

Veteran Entrepreneur Mentoring

HirePatriots vigorously seeks to support veterans who have chosen to start their own businesses. We believe that this is crucial to the rebuilding of the American economy and to employing more of our transitioned U.S. military. HirePatriots has created a valuable training and support program for U.S Veteran entrepreneurs. We use the combined business acumen of our multiple HirePatriots’ business leaders to provide step-by-step hands on business development training.

Military Marriage Enrichment Retreats

Our military’s emotional and psychological health, as well as their professionalism is largely dependent upon the health of their relationships with their immediate family members. The divorce rate has risen as high as 90% on bases with frequent combat deployments. Military wives call it "The Plague."

Patriotic Hearts hosts military marriage enrichment retreats to strengthen military and veterans’ marriages. The theme of our retreats is "Love and Respect." They last from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. We continue to follow each couple closely after the retreats. And we have had wonderful success in keeping marriages and families united. These are all-expenses paid retreats.

Financial Wellness

Patriotic Hearts provides training on how to manage personal and family income, through seminars, retreats and online. This is a unique and comprehensive 5 point Financial Wellness series of workshop courses that has been specifically designed for veterans, active duty, and military families. It is a customized, financial wellness curriculum that focuses on helping our heroes and their families understand their particular spending personalities. Then we teach the essentials of money management. And we also explain the necessity for multiple streams of income and investment strategies.

Career & Personal Counseling

Many qualified volunteers offer to give professional counseling to US veterans’ career search. And marriage counselors, PTSD experts and licensed psychologists also donate their time and services.

School Kids Program

A wonderful result of our increasing popularity has been that public schools are adopting Patriotic Hearts and HirePatriots as a community service project. These schools receive their own HirePatriots.com website, and the students fill it with their patriotic efforts, essays, videos and pictures. We are also writing a curriculum and a book to promote this program and make it a perpetual part of our American fabric.

Educational Endeavors

In the last 50 years the American population has gone from 90% of American males being US military veterans to less than 1% of our current generation. And further reductions in our nation’s Armed Forces are being planned. There now exists a tremendous vacuum of understanding and appreciation for the important role veterans and their families play in keeping America a safe haven for democracy and freedom. In response, Patriotic Hearts trains patriotic citizens to speak and seeks out opportunities on TV, radio, in the press, and at community events, associations, clubs and schools for them teach about US veterans’ sacrifices and critical role in preserving our way of life.

Veterans Green Program

In order to raise funds for our Patriotic Hearts programs we are asking companies to donate their e-waste to us. Those companies will receive a certificate of donation from our non-profit. We will hire US veterans to pick up and recycle their waste. And we will be able to fund the vital programs we provide with that assistance.